9 ms·
Microsoft employees getting free Surface tablets, new work PCs, Windows Phone 8
- CurtHagenlocher 14y agoObligatory snark: this will double the WinPhone8 installed base! Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft but left the company meeting early.
- reddiric 14y agoResponse to snark (which I don't know why you think was obligatory): PC World reports 5.4 million Windows Phone 7s sold this quarter alone (http://www.pcworld.com/article/262287/windows_phone_fails_to_gain_traction_in_second_quarter.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/262287/windows_phone_fails_to...). With 94,000 employees, this would increase Windows Phone sales by 1.7% in a single quarter, and be a much smaller percentage of installed base.
- damian2000 14y agoWP7 != WP8 AFAIK there is no official WP8 user base yet?
- reddiric 14y agoCorrect... and?
- rm999 14y agoSo your reply about the wp7 userbase size was irrelevant to the discussion.
- reddiric 14y agoDo you believe that was a misleading statistic to use to give a general idea of the scale of the inaccuracy of the original comment? Sorry I'm being short in all these replies, I'm tired of and choosing to call people out on unconstructive snark and pedantry.
- barrkel 14y agoI thought it pointed out how accurate its hyperbole was :) 1.7% is huge.
- CurtHagenlocher 14y agoI should have said "preemptive" rather than "obligatory". I think WinPhone is a great product, but there's no denying that it's been a bit of a laggard in the market.
- reddiric 14y agoUsually people attach preemptive snark to otherwise constructive contributions. Otherwise it's just snark.
- jmspring 14y agoLaggard? Maybe. But the thing Microsoft usually gets right is finding success in iterations. I like WP7/8 myself, but my household is mostly Apple products for simplicity of integration and my preference for things based on Unix.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoDid he announce that all employees are getting WP8 devices or just American employees (~45k)? Given that subsidies are not common outside of the US, I'm thinking only 1%. We only just recently got our WP7 devices here in China (I work for Microsoft China). I still have not seen a Windows Phone device in the wild; I hope our market share is much better in the states!
- wideroots 14y agoAsk your boss. Not here.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoIt will take them awhile to figure this out. I just meant to say that when they announce these, it might not affect 90K worldwide employees right away, its more like the 40K in USA/Redmond + figure out how to handle in each other country based on unique circumstances (availability, taxes, etc...).
- jimbobimbo 14y agoMeeting was webcasted around the world (within MSFT).
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoAh! Did they do a reasonable time delay for each market? Some of us need to sleep.
- brudgers 14y agoFrom word processing to servers to compilers, no tech company eats their own dog food like Microsoft. They even have their own search engine. It's an under appreciated feature of their corporate culture that first hit me when I asked myself, "Why the hell does Microsoft sell project?" and realized that just about everything they have developed since DOS has been something they could use in house.
- jere 14y ago>no tech company eats their own dog food like Microsoft See, I've always assumed the exact opposite based on how rough the user experience is on so many Microsoft products. I've often wondered if it was possible for a web developer at MS to sit down with IE for 30 minutes and not think "I have to fix this.... now!" When I realized how awesome Chrome developer tools were I never wanted to go back. But of course, as a web developer, you have to go back. Or maybe that is the problem. Maybe too much dogfooding blinds you to how great the competitor is.
- avree 14y agoThe new IE is actually pretty good. Microsoft knows that IE6 is an abomination and even made a website dedicated to its demise: http://www.ie6countdown.com/ http://www.ie6countdown.com/
- JacksonGariety 14y agoDAMMIT CHINA!
- jere 14y agoAre you referring to 9 or 10? My point regarding 9 is that the developer tools are buggy and painful to use compared to chrome. As a web developer, you would want them fixed as soon as possible.
- tesseractive 14y agoMS has tons of development tools available internally that they don't release to the world. It's possible that what you're wishing you had is sitting out on Toolbox, invisible to anyone outside the firewall. There's something of a culture of "our internal developers are smarter than our external developers" at Microsoft, so dev tools are often where the dogfooding has been the weakest. It comes from having internal developers who are hacking on things like OS kernels while the external developers have a massive population of coders churning out enterprise CRUD forms (along with a smaller population of more advanced developers), but this internal/external tool gap sometimes really bites them.
- niels_olson 14y agoThe problem with selling things: if you can't sell them, you better figure out how to eat them. I think MSFT is learning how to eat computers.
- jobowoo 14y agoI think you're reading too much into this. Google gives out a free Android phone to its employees every year.
- niels_olson 14y agoFair enough. Let's say their cost for a phone, computer, and tablet is $2000. With 94,000 employees, that's 188 $M. I suppose that's pretty trivial when your market cap is 259 $B.
- inoop 14y agoMore like $200 for a tablet, and $400-$600 for a phone. Those are retail prices, and I'm sure MS gets a pretty good discount on those too. You tend to get things a lot cheaper if you buy a lot of them.
- goggles99 14y agoTrolls deserve the downvote. You are not only detracting, you are giving false information (lying).
- alttag 14y agoThis mass upgrade will have the negative side-effect of moving all 94,000 employees to the same spot in their three-year upgrade cycle. If this proves true, it's interesting, headline-grabbing, and ultimately short-sighted, as it will result in a great deal of hurt feelings in the long run as the replacement cycle is stretched out again (for logistics and accounting purposes, if nothing else.) Oh, and the many, many contractors look like they'll be hosed. Again.
- wingspan 14y agoIt's a small gesture when you look at the big picture (total compensation, etc), but this means a lot to me as an employee, and really shows Microsoft's commitment to the new era of Windows 8 on beautiful devices. It will be interesting to see how the Windows Phone 8 devices are distributed, as the previous deal for 7 was a free device only if you sign up for a 2-year contract. Unfortunately I just moved teams, so I was in the process of ordering a new machine anyway; but still, a new Surface tablet will be awesome.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ixacto 14y agoHave fun working with Vista 2.0.
- ebf 14y agoCould you clarify why Windows 8 is Vista 2.0?
- CamperBob2 14y agoLike Vista, it is designed around things Microsoft needs it to do, not what the user needs it to do.
- ebf 14y agoThat seems like a pretty vague explanation.
- CamperBob2 14y agoHint: Users didn't ask for a desktop OS that looks and works more like their phones... or rather, like the phones that Ballmer hopes to sell them at a later date.
- ixacto 14y ago"Where did the start menu go", "Where did IE go?" -Millions of office workers...
- Jarihd 14y agoI wonder how come MS is able to afford giving free hardware to so many of their employees. Earlier they gave the Windows Phone and now the Tablet. Is it a good marketing strategy. Do non-MS people buy their products, based on word-of-mouth spread by MS employees. Does this strategy really work ???
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoIts probably more about morale than marketing. Getting employees to experience and enjoy the company's products is very important. Also, they might build more apps for WP and Win8 in their spare time. But 90K people...isn't really enough to make a huge impact, perhaps the ~40K in Redmond/Bellevue, but the effect would dilute quickly as you approached downtown Seattle from the eastside. Edit: morale vs. moral
- Jarihd 14y agoI totally agree with employees being allowed to enjoy and explore company products; and that such experiences should be absolutely free for all employees; but wonder if this experience should be limited within the company premises. btw, does the hardware belong to the employee or is a property of MS. If the hardware is property of the employee, how does that make sense for MS, when employees switch jobs for their betterment (job + monetary reasons) . AFAIK, MS at Redmond does not give Windows OS(software) for free; but gives it at a discount to its employees. Why not use the same strategy with hardware – give it with some discount – say 50% discount. Win Apps - Do you really need to give hardware to build Apps for WP and Win8 or software alone would do ???
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoYou need hardware to test and also motivate your work. You wouldn't build an iPad app without an iPad neh? Hardware discounts are hard when you aren't producing the hardware. You are basically subsidizing cost, and...you could imagine how much trouble that is! Better to just give it away; besides, if it was Microsoft campus store only, it would be only good for the folks in Redmond. Attrition happens, but honestly losing an employee costs more than a phone and a tablet!
- farnsworth 14y agoThere's a lot to this, for the company, other than employees getting bonuses in hardware instead of cash. They're putting MS products in the hands of tens of thousands of people most invested in evangelizing and evaluating them - every MS software product benefits from dogfooding, why not hardware? It will presumably give MS a chance to debug enterprise bring-your-own-device that they are trying to support by implementing it on an enormous scale themselves. These are developers who may be now inclined to write apps. And most MS employees don't have laptops, so now they won't be stuck with pen and paper in meetings.
- wideroots 14y agoPlus, if they like it, they might buy a few for their family and friends for the upcoming holiday season!